Act I

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For one reason or another, children who lose their parents become unkillable heroes. One was the Locust Queen. On the back of the old prophecy she conquered five kingdoms, won two hundred battles and buried eighty-thousand corpses. Then the most powerful woman in the world hid herself away behind ramparts and magma beasts — all because a new prophecy arose.

Now, prophecies that foretell a death by orphan are par for the course, but this one in particular was about the Locust Queen’s death, so she paced around endlessly in her fortress. She bit her fingernails to stubs and tore out her hair in clumps and ate nothing for a week.

Finally she stooped so low as to beg advice from her courtesan, Enzo. They were lovers in the sense that she cast him out of her chambers before she slept, and lovers in the sense that later, at her bidding, he traversed the length of the country to firebomb an orphanage. Originally, however, what she wanted was genocide.

"You can't just kill every orphan in the world," said Enzo. "Some of those orphans have children, and then we'd just be making orphans of orphans of orphans."

She raked her fingers across her scalp. "I'm begging you, stop saying that dreadful word! You're going to give me nightmares. Oh, Enzo, what am I to do?"

At that moment, a jet of flame erupted inside the courtyard, and magma beasts — final bosses in their own right — swarmed it, grunting as they drank. Above them a giga-vulture shrieked, crossing the cracked plains of Mergweide in a single wingbeat. Enzo shepherded his queen out onto the balcony, the sulphuric air washed over them, and they stared over the wasteland towards the steaming volcanoes on the horizon.

He said, "Just look at what they'd have to get through to come here. I'm anything but a gambling man, honeybun, but only one in a million orphans could tough it out through that."

"And yet — one will come."

"Easy, easy. Deep breaths, my sugar cube. What I'm saying is, we can be clever about this. I'll send off some letters and we'll see if we can't find this one in a million orphan. There have to be reports of such an extraordinarily talented magician."

In the following days, the queen spent every hour clutching her locust amulet, channelling a terrible spell. Even in her dreams she chanted. It took so much energy that despite consuming their entire larder she began to wither away, skin hanging off bones. When the food ran out, she shut herself up in her chambers. The magma beasts turned to graze elsewhere, for they were sensitive to the mounting dread, and the scorched field on which the fortress stood grew cold and silent.

Finally Enzo came to her with news. The Locust Queen looked awful, slumped over like a haggard marionette.

He said, "Thanks to a tip-off from an old friend, I do believe I've found our orphans, my poppet."

At the mention of orphans in plural, dark energy crackled forth from the queen's amulet, and she shuddered. If she hadn't steeled herself right then, the world would probably have ended, so great was the scale of the spell she was preparing.

Enzo brewed her the last of the chamomile and lowered grapes into her mouth as he continued. "So, my friend told me of an orphanage owned by a Mr Begeleider, and several things about it struck me as odd. Firstly, there are only six orphans in his care. Quite a small number considering the eighty thousand corpses behind us, don't you think?

"Secondly, all of the orphans are in fact full grown adults, with the youngest being twenty and the oldest being five-and-fifty. Now why do you suppose a fifty-five year old needs to stay at an orphanage? I'm afraid our final piece of news tells an unfortunate truth.

"Each of the six orphans has bonded with an insect. If I had to, I would guess they train together daily, as we did in our yesteryear. But Mr Begeleider's explicit purpose in founding his orphanage is, in fact, to train an orphan capable of dethroning you. He, um, he wrote it on the sign outside."

For a long time the queen stared at Enzo. A chill wind whistled through the fortress as the sun set. Finally she said, "This Begeleider. Who is he?"

Enzo shrugged. "Probably one of the kings we exiled under alias, or a disgruntled owner of one of those fields we torched. Nonetheless, we know where he is, and we know he has six unkillable heroes backed by prophecy — so what do we do?"

The locust in the queen’s amulet beat its wings and a low hum arose, a deep and rumbling shockwave that rippled across the country and caused the heart of every mammal to skip a beat, and the world collectively held its breath. Enzo fell to his knees. When he looked to the face of his lover, he saw only darkness.

The Locust Queen said, "This spell I’m preparing is only a failsafe. We must still find a way to kill them."

They found one. What followed was the most intense week of Enzo's life. Driven by fear, he worked on a hex until he fainted from hunger, only to wake up with his lips still chanting dark words and the mosquito perched on his palm. During those times when he was too weak, the Locust Queen clung to his side, spoon-feeding him honey as she muttered incantations. They seldom spoke.

She slowly grew more confident in their plan, and her full head of hair returned, and her eyes sparkled with life. The night before Enzo was due to ride out to the orphanage, she welcomed him back into her chambers and she told him she would miss him, and she told him she would love him. But they were too exhausted to do anything except hold fast against their nightmares.

An experienced cyclist and indeed, an experienced magician with a mosquito in his locket, Enzo barely noticed the country as he rode. He flowed around dangers like a leaf on a river, and more than once he hexed an attacking creature to death without realising it, whereupon he cursed himself for removing another defence that might have stopped an intermediate hero.

Past the earthy pines of Boswald; the glittering peaks of Koud Heuvel; the slick boulders of Steengroeve; the blinding adobe of Weerstrand; the jagged cliffs of Korrelduin, and on and on...

He felt too tense to sleep, and he cursed himself for that too, because who tries to fight six bonded orphans without getting a good night's sleep? After days of heavy riding, of scenery blurring together like paintings left out in the rain, he finally reached the southern border and it was only there, a mile from Mr Begeleider’s orphanage, that his body let him rest. As soon as he dismounted, his bicycle collapsed and never rose again. The magician fell down and shut his eyes.

Come sunrise just as planned, the most powerful orphan in the world, the Locust Queen, let loose her magnum opus.

Corrupting ancient leylines of power, she carved up the land into hexagons, and she stitched everything back together like a patchwork quilt.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Which is to say the minister of Weerstrand left his bedroom for a morning wee and found himself tackle out in a Korrelduinse pub, violating their thirty year non-aggression pact.

Which is to say a herd of peace-deer frolicked not into their bubbling spring but into the gaping mouth of a magma beast, where they were lost in a puff of barbeque smoke.

Which is to say the citizens of Steengroeve, who lived in a bustling crater fifty meters below sea level, gathered by their doorways and watched helplessly as the ocean rolled towards them.

It is also to say that all the maps were suddenly wrong, and the Locust Queen's castle hidden. It was a disaster greater than had ever befallen the world, but it was also the only failsafe they had. Now everything depended on Enzo and his hex.

ACT II

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Zoom in; slow down.

The sign read ‘Death to the Locust Queen Orphanage’.

Enzo clambered up the winding track towards it, heart in his throat. Mountains hugged the blossoming trees, so tightly-knit that they draped the hillside in a carpet of fuschia. The air sagged under a thick haze of jasmine. Buzzing insects whined above him, overpowering the birdsong. Evenly-spaced throughout the grove were pillboxes of mud and limestone topped with wildflowers, barely visible under the canopy, and each had been constructed as an exact copy. He stopped counting them at fifty.

To think he was up against this, and five other schools of magic! Shivering even under the full heat of the sun, he ducked into the treeline and tore the locket off his neck. Mosquito-class spells thrived on victims who were unaware — it was hardly suited to open battle, so Enzo cracked the mosquito out of its protective membrane and urged it to fly above him, masked in the cloud of bugs.

This came with certain dangers. Should a robin swoop down and hoover the mosquito up, he would die, and without touching it he couldn’t cast any hexes. Yet he still felt safer after hurling the locket into the undergrowth.

It was difficult to take further steps up the path in a way that looked comfortable. He staggered forward, wary of being snuffed out any second, gasping shallow breaths amidst the pollen. Behind him, far away from the heights of the grove, the world was falling into chaos as the incompatible environments mingled. A few more bends, a couple hundred feet of climbing -- in his mind he held the image of his lover, lest his last thoughts be of anything else. His skin, drenched in humid sweat, struggled to contain the hex brewing inside him.

"Halt," barked a gruff voice.

The ground on which he was about to step suddenly raised, springing up as a thick wall of mud to block him off. He wheeled around, and there, leaning on a tree trunk, was a woman holding an amulet. Enzo suppressed the reflex to clutch his own. Outing himself as a magician would mean a fight to the death.

She was going on forty, probably, stout with a crew cut, not a hair out of place, wearing a tight vest and shorts to minimise an opponent's advantage in grappling, and there -- the woman moved her hand away, revealing an ant in the clasp around her neck. The air shimmered about a foot from her body, the same armour of prophecy that had once lit up the Locust Queen.

She marched towards him, boots pounding the earth. Her brown eyes bored into his.

She said, "Tell me who you are. And why you're here."

Enzo froze up, trying not to look at the swarming mayflies, plus one mosquito, above him. Would she notice if he called it back? He drew his cashmere cloak tightly around himself.

"M-my village," he cried, pointing vaguely towards the water cascading over Steengroeve. "I plead you, we need a magician! Hundreds perish as we speak, maybe thousands!"

"Right. From all the way over there? Really?" She turned those heavy eyes to the valley. "...Your bicycle?"

"My bicycle?" he yelped. "Beset upon by... well, it hardly sounds credible now that I voice it, but by ice-lions! What exactly is happening this grim morning, madame, I plead you? Ice-lions haven't been sighted in these parts for centuries. I haven't the energy to repeat myself -- we need a magician!"

No sympathy or understanding cracked through the ant-woman's face. She stood impassive as a mountain. Something rustled in the bushes behind them, something that sounded like a tumbling bucket of wind-chimes. Oh greatest of shits, another one?

"Er… what the hell are you dawdling back there for?" trickled in a voice sweet as honey. This other woman stepped out sheepishly, no older than thirty, pierced symmetrically in pretty much every place it was possible to be pierced, wearing a tinkling suit of ringmail, with a bee hanging off her ear in a metal cage. "What's up with this guy, Puck? Some kind of refugee or something?"

The path began to shimmer in an awfully prophetic fashion. Heavy, hazy. It took everything Enzo had not to shake, a fledgling cornered by cats. If he cast his hex now, there’d still be four other orphans out to kill the Locust Queen, and nothing to stop them.

"So he says," said Puck, the ant magician. "I don't believe him. Sounds like the ladybird when he lies."

"What would I even be lying about?" cried Enzo. "I plead you, my people are in danger!"

She nodded. "See? Exactly like the ladybird."

The bee magician giggled at a random bush. Then she put her hand on Puck's shoulder and sized Enzo up. "Look, the guy's got a right to just walk around, hasn't he? We don't have time to stop and question every Tom, Dick and Harry!"

Puck now turned her attention to the mayflies (plus mosquito) hovering above Enzo's head, and she pursed her lips into a grim, waning smile.

She said, "The timing is suspicious. Before we go, I want to see his neck."

"My neck?" said Enzo, drawing ever deeper into his cloak, the mayflies lowering with him in an incriminating way. "Whatever for?"

"You won't let me see it?"

"If you supply a good enough reason, I might! But I question your logic in such an intrusion, when my family's trapped on the roof of their house against rising waters! You spoke of prophecies, madame. Well, they say in the prophecies that orphans are heroes, don't they? And, furthermore..."

She waited until he'd exhausted himself -- the altitude was shortening his breaths -- and then she said, "You talk too much. Magicians wear amulets. You'd have a mark around your neck. That's the reason."

"I'd hurry up if I were you, my dude," said the bee-woman. "You're not gonna change her mind. Just do what she wants and we'll be off racing to Steengroeve before you know it."

The two women glared at him expectantly. The aroma of flowers was dizzying -- he felt faint.

"I'm a groundskeeper," he protested as he lowered his cloak to reveal the mark. "I wear a ring of keys about my neck from dawn till dusk. Does that make me a magician? Is a jailor a magician? Is a farmhand?"

"Okay, yeah," the bee-woman cupped her insect protectively. "He does lie like Otis! Well, maybe this guy's a little better."

"His hands," said Puck, suddenly grabbing one. "They're very soft. No callouses. He is a magician."

The three of them paused as worms wiggled out of the earthen wall and far off, the city of Steengroeve continued to sink.

"Oh, alright." Enzo leapt backwards and called his mosquito to land on his head. "Quite simply, ladies, I'm here to condemn you to death in the name of my liege, the Locust Queen! I advise against underestimating me. Hear my war cry and despair: aaaaaaah!"

At once four orphans stepped out of the brush, encircling him, each with an amulet of their own -- cricket, moth, ladybird, and scorpion, which wasn’t even an insect and therefore cheating. They shimmered with plot armour.

"A pitiable war cry," said Puck, crossing her arms. "I've heard stronger screams."

“This is hardly very sporting,” said Enzo. “I thought all six of you would have already rushed out to save the world.”

"Good lying, hot stuff," said the young man with the ladybird. "But nothing compared to my bluff magic. We saw you coming up the path. Why didn't you just cut through the forest?"

Tendrils of dark energy rippled over Enzo's skin. "It seems I didn't need to draw the six of you out after all. My apologies for previously shouting. Since you’ve come to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, well, it certainly expedites matters, and perhaps all hope is not lost against that devilish prophecy. Experience may yet win the day…”

He paused, just in case they took the correct action and ran. He’d only have one shot at this. They held their formation, confident in their trap, and not one of them was brave enough to rush him down. Novice heroics at best, to let a villain monologue.

Mosquito in hand, he said, “Congratulations, orphans, you have trained long and hard, and I'm sure you're brimming with caution, hence the six of you have come to match the force of one enemy, as your master likely instructed. Let this hex be a lesson — you are still outmatched.”

Enzo unleashed his magnum opus. It is difficult to describe how such a spell operated in terms of metaphysics — Enzo hardly knew the truth of it himself — but to put it in simple terms, what he did was drag your eyes down the page. And you watched.

He bound their souls to the gods who watch. The tether slipped neatly through the orphan’s prophetic armour, and while they were still bowled over, gawping at the countdown that inked itself into their hands like a tattoo, he leapt between them and fled into the trees.

Only later, after night fell and he stopped to rest behind a waterfall, his magic utterly depleted, did he realise he’d also accidentally cast it on himself.

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